Captive to Christ, Open to the World: On Doing Christian Ethics in Public

By Brian Brock

In this wide-ranging and engaging collection of interviews, Brian Brock discusses how Christian faith makes a difference for life in the modern world. Beginning with a discussion of teaching Christian ethics in the contemporary academy, Brock takes up environmental questions, political and medical ethics, the modern city and Christian responsibility to it, energy use, the information age, agriculture, political consensus and coercion, and many other issues. The reader is thus offered a broad and incisive discussion of many contemporary topics in a brief, illuminating, but never superficial manner. The book's unusual conversational style allows strikingly clear, creative, and concrete theological connections to emerge in the spaces between moral questions rarely thought of as linked. As the titles suggests, the running theme of the interviews is being bound to Christ and placed into the contemporary world. Brock's theological readings of contemporary cultural trends are vigorous, unapologetic, and insightful, and they offer delightful surprises as well as fertile new ways through the sterile impasses of many issues currently being debated in the public square. This book provides an excellent starting point for those interested in fresh theological insights into contemporary ethical questions and an accessible introduction to Brock's previous works.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: Jul 11, 2014
• ISBN: 9781630873233

Brian Brock

Brian Brock is Professor of Moral and Practical Theology at the University of Aberdeen. He is the author of Singing the Ethos of God: On the Place of Christian Ethics in Scripture (2007) and Christian Ethics in a Technological Age (2010), and editor of Theology, Disability and the New Genetics: Why Science Needs the Church (2007) and Disability in the Christian Tradition: A Reader (2012), both with John Swinton. Interviewed by Amy Erickson Amy Erickson: Both of you are systematic and moral theologians. How come you have turned to writing a biblical commentary, and how did it feel to be working outside of your usual habitat, so to speak? Bernd Wannenwetsch: It felt absolutely great. In fact, I don't remember I have ever had so much joy working on a project. In the end most of what made the process so satisfying came from constantly being pushed out of our normal academic comfort zone. There is a sense of intellectual adventure that comes with the challenge of having to find one's feet in unknown territory. The mental and practical preparation necessary for writing a commentary is very different than what is demanded by a monograph or scholarly article. What we found liberating about doing theology in a different literary genre is the way it pushed us not only out of the routine working patterns in our normal area but also made us take a step back from the tried and tested intellectual approaches we have found to work well enough to be repeated over and over again. At the same time we were also surprised at the extent to which working directly on a biblical text felt like a homecoming. We really shouldn't have been surprised by this because, historically speaking, the attempt to try to understand Scripture for oneself and then help others to see what you have seen is the very impulse that gave birth to the intellectual praxis we call theology. There is no doubt that we had both been usefully prepared for this task in long having been convinced that Christian ethics, if it is going to be genuinely theological, has to be rooted in biblical inquiry. No matter how novel or "unprecedented" it may appear, every subject we think about in theology demands a fresh look at the biblical tradition in order to be understood more fully and truthfully. We discovered again that when we take ideas and dilemmas we feel to be novel to Scripture, what we discover anew that it is Scripture that is always new and fresh. AE: What made you chose 1 Corinthians? Bernd Wannenwetsch: The suggestion initially came from a publisher, but the fact that the letter is so rich in discussions of concrete moral problems made the invitation immediately attractive. What we discovered not long after is that this was also a real temptation--to read Paul too instantaneously as a "fellow ethicist". We only discovered this as a temptation when it became clear that if we were really to get to grips with Paul's approach to the moral questions he discusses, we were going to have to dig deep into the doctrinal convictions and discourses that undergird his explicit moral exhortations and arguments. We often found that it was only when we resisted moralizing modes of interpreting Paul that a window swung open to a different, more exciting and ultimately more truthful understanding of what he has to say. Brian Brock: What was illuminating about this process is that through it we made the unexpected discovery that the letter is organized by an unexpectedly deep theological unity. Despite the fact that biblical scholars consider the letter to be largely free of textual emendation and genuinely Pauline, it is nevertheless in practice almost always read in a manner that firewalls the doctrinal and moral passages in the letter off from one another. We discovered that the letter really is not made up of separate discussions of ethical problems and worship practices that are set within some theological prefatory remarks. It is an integrated theological investigation of all these problematics at the same time. Attempting to understand Paul's moral exhortations, we were continually being drawn more deeply into his theological vision of the whole of creation and the salvation economy--which exposed the superficiality of the very common practice of dividing the book up into parts devoted to decorum in worship, sexual ethics, and a theology of love. AE: Another unusual aspect of this book is that it is co-authored. How did you make this work for you? Brian Brock: We ended up developing a nice working routine, which we describe in more detail in the introduction to Malady. We wrote the text line by line sitting together at the same desk. It ended up being those hours and hours of conversation around the text that sustained our energy for what turned out to be a pretty monumental project. We usually met twice a year, at each meeting typically managing to draft up a prose version of the commentary on one chapter of Corinthians. Afterward we each separately went over this prose draft multiple times, but the beating heart of the project remained the hours spent sitting with the text, with the Greek text and several translations spread out around us. We really came to look forward to those meetings a great deal. AE: Did you feel that the differences between your respective cultural and ecclesial upbringings, one as a German Lutheran and the other as an American from a missionary church background, shaped the way you were approaching the biblical material? Bernd Wannenwetsch: Absolutely. Realizing how deeply these differences affected our respective perspectives was one of the surprise realizations that came to us on route. At the most superficial level, these differences in cultural and ecclesial background forced us to articulate ourselves in ways that took into account a wider and more diverse audience. Readers will no doubt notice how often passages in the commentary address questions that are most lively in the North American context while others are more pressing for European Christians. At a deeper level it then began to become clear how these geographical and cultural differences were often linked directly to sensibilities we had inherited from noticeably different ecclesial traditions. By coming face to face with these different sensibilities we were learning to speak to each other not only as individuals but also as representatives of different church traditions. To be aware of this "ecumenical" moment in our reading fellowship was helpful in allowing us first to see and then formulate more precisely what it was in our respective ways of having been traditioned that would attract us to particular readings of 1 Corinthians, for better or worse. In the process we began to "see" the specific blindfolds our traditions have put on us but also where they have equipped us with particularly sharp lenses. Having to become more self-aware of ways in which our respective church experiences were organizing our perception in the end helped us better to make contact with the sensibilities that are visible in the Corinthian church to whom Paul first wrote. The joint writing thus helped us detect the "Corinthians" in us, the European Lutheran the North American Congregationalist, with our respective tendencies to think and act like the factions in Corinth who assumed their way of "doing" Christianity was superior to others. AE: How then did you deal with these different viewpoints? How did you engage them in the process of reflecting and writing together? Bernd Wannenwetsch: The mutual trust we have in each other's judgment allowed us to explore exegetical disagreements in a manner that never had to be settled by having a battle ending in either one interpretation "winning" or us having to agree to a compromise reading that neither of us really supported. And we never allowed ourselves the co-author's escape clause: "here we present two equally possible ways of understanding the passage"! Instead, we took disagreements as a challenge and an opening that promised to lead us to taking a fresh, deeper look at Paul's argument. After having discovered ourselves defending deadlocked rival readings we regularly found ourselves forced to start over from scratch. Often it was as we were taking this second look at the text that we felt new insights really "came to us". Because we both knew our initial readings were not really going to work we were prepared for this experience of hearing the verbum externum, that "alien word" that can only be heard but not predicted. This being stripped of our initial readings became such a familiar process that we finally felt we needed to give it a label. We called it "reading Paul against ourselves". AE: Where have you been surprised by your own reading of this epistle? Brian Brock: It was rare that a chapter did not offer us substantial surprises, for the reasons Bernd just suggested. We knew that once we began to look at a passage in earnest, we were likely to end up with a different reading than the one that initially seemed obvious to us. To take one example, when in chapter 8 (v. 7) Paul says that he would rather not eat meat than to defile the conscience of brethren who feel nervous around meat offered to idols, his aim is to confront those who believe themselves to have strong consciences. In this first discussion of eating idol meat he uses the language of "weak conscience" to suggest that those who claim to be strong are in fact devoid of a social conscience. That makes you think about what conscience is, theologically speaking. Is it a little moral judge in your head making sure you keep the universal principles of justice, or is it supposed to connect you to other people? Paul obviously presses us to conceive of conscience in the latter sense, but this is not at all how moderns are used to thinking. To think with Paul resituates the place that our brothers and sisters occupy in our self-identification and our identification as Christians. He is offering us an unfamiliar, but deeply theological and ecclesial picture of the conscience. AE: This book ambitiously engages a wide range of scholarly domains--biblical studies, systematic theology, ethics, and philosophy. How did you handle the risk that in the process one or several of these domains is getting short-changed or watered down? Brian Brock: In the end we felt that to take Scripture seriously was to be forced out into disciplinary domains that the modern academy has artificially walled off from each other. Sometimes it seemed obvious to us that a received reading was based on a philosophical mistake. We had to discuss philosophical problems if we were to free the text in question from an interpretative framework that we believed was obscuring a point we felt Paul to be making. In other cases we found that contemporary biblical scholars and translators were paying very close attention to the text but in a manner that we found either breathtakingly non-theological or to be driven by questionable theological parameters. Similar challenges arose when we discussed pastoral and liturgical issues, taking us again into different types of debates and literatures. In the end we embraced this as the great wonder of the project, and why it differed so greatly from our usual practice as Christian ethicists. It was not our problems we were taking to Scripture, but the other way around: Scripture was creating problems for us--ones that were simultaneously exegetical and existential. Who do you hope will read this work? Bernd Wannenwetsch: While we would love to see this book being read and discussed by members of our own guild--that of academic theologians, including, dare we say, the odd theologically interested biblical scholar--our main hope is that it will be attractive to those who engage with Scripture in the context of ecclesial proclamation, those pastors who might find some of our suggestions illuminating as they prepare sermons. We would also be delighted if the book finds its way into the hands of some Christian laypeople who have not yet given up on academic theologians but remain hungry for works that offer them some meaty yet accessible food for thought that helps them grow as Christians and as human beings.

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Captive to Christ, Open to the World

On Doing Christian Ethics in Public

Brian Brock

Edited by Kenneth Oakes

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Captive to Christ, Open to the World

On Doing Christian Ethics in Public

Copyright © 2014 Brian Brock. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

Cascade Books

An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

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isbn 13: 978-1-62564-018-5

eisbn 13: 978-1-63087-323-3

Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

Brock, Brian, 1970-

Captive to Christ, open to the world : on doing Christian ethics in public / Brian Brock ; edited by Kenneth Oakes.

xviii + 144 pp. ; 23 cm. Includes bibliographical references.

isbn 13: 978-1-62564-018-5

1. Christian ethics. 2. Technology—Religious aspects—Christianity. 3. Higher education. I. Title.

BJ59 .B77 2014

Manufactured in the U.S.A.

For Russ

because he asked

Introduction

Kenneth Oakes

This book is a collection of edited interviews that took place on various occasions between Brian Brock and several different interviewers. Though the interview can seem lightweight when placed alongside the peer-reviewed article, the research monograph, or the book chapter, it has unique advantages over other genres: the explicit presence of several voices critically interacting; the unexpected twists in argument, flow, and topic; and the immediacy it allows into the speakers’ personalities and thought processes. While such generalities are true, and also true of the following chapters, they don’t yet express why I find these interviews so worthy of consideration.

While studying theology at the University of Aberdeen, I came to know Brian primarily through conversations in departmental seminars, breakfasts after morning prayer, and late nights at St. Machar or the Bobbin. As a completely partial observer, then, what I like most about these interviews are the reminders they offer me of Brian’s ability to push one to think harder, to think creatively, and above all to think concretely. Editing this volume also gives me an opportunity to make good on Brian’s having introduced me to my favorite question in contemporary jurisprudence: who, exactly, owns the moon?

In order to unpack and anticipate some of the ideas found within the interviews, we could do worse than spend time with one of Brian’s heroes: Martin Luther. In his 1531 Small Catechism, Luther explains the first article of the Apostles’ Creed, I believe in God the Creator, in this way:

I believe God has created me together with all that exists. God has given me and still preserves my body and soul; eyes, ears, and all limbs and senses; reason and all mental faculties. In addition, God daily and abundantly provides shoes and clothing, food and drink, house and farm, spouse and children, fields, livestock and all property—along with all necessities and nourishment for this body and life.¹

Notice that for Luther confessing that God is Creator entails discussing everyday things like houses, fields, animals, and ears. We are not offered cosmological observations or metaphysical descriptions of God’s attributes, but instead a list of things one can find around the house. Notice also that Luther’s list includes examples pulled from nature (body, eyes, limbs, children), but also examples from the world of culture and production (shoes, clothing, fields). We could even go so far to say that the examples from culture are also examples of technology, for each requires certain tools, shared and taught practices, and resources dedicated to producing them. Finally, notice also how this explanation of a creedal confession seems on the verge of bursting into praise and thanksgiving for all of the mundane gifts of God. Indeed, how could one confess and understand that God is Creator without experiencing the temptation of offering up praise?

We can find a similar type of reasoning in Luther’s Large Catechism when he develops the meaning of give us our daily bread from the Lord’s Prayer:

God wishes to show us how he cares for us in all our needs and faithfully provides for our daily sustenance. Although he gives and proves these blessings bountifully, even to the godless and rogues, yet he wishes us to ask for them so that we may realize that we have received them from his hand and may recognize in them his fatherly goodness towards us. When he withdraws his hand, nothing can prosper or last for any length of time, as indeed we see and experience every day. How much trouble there is in the world simply on account of false coinage, yes, on account of daily exploitation and usury in public business, commerce, and labor on the part of those who wantonly oppress the poor and deprive them of their daily bread!²

Notice again how quickly Luther moves from the prayer Jesus taught his disciples to pray, to God’s continual providing for his creatures, and finally to matters of finance, labor, and commerce.

Although they differ in content, both quotations share a common trajectory and ease. As for their common movement, each begins with questions fit for Sunday school and next leaps into talk of food production and distribution, the economic reverberations and motivations for counterfeit currency, the evils of exorbitant interest rates, and the exploitation of workers. In each Luther is pushed into the world of economics in the course of answering ostensibly theological questions about the Apostles’ Creed and the Lord’s Prayer. He even identifies God’s withdrawing his hand with a rise in these unjust economic practices. Grace, here, is not divorced from material, economic matters, and Luther in fact views the whole realm of activity dedicated to providing for one’s household, or oeconomia, with one of the primary ways in which God provides for and blesses his creatures. While the trajectory of the quotations may seem counter-intuitive at first, we could readily substitute the biblical passage or creedal material under consideration and imagine exploring how this would reveal aspects of our own contexts. How might this Luther explain what release to the captives means in an age when mass incarceration has become an out-sourced, for-profit business activity? How might this Luther interpret the commandment and promise of Sabbath rest in an age of labor compounds like Foxconn?

As for their ease of movement, each quotation smoothly shifts between the vastly different realms of theology, ethics, pastoral care, and everyday matters. Luther seems blissfully unaware of our sharp divisions between Christian confessions and the material world, or between theology, ethics, and exegesis. Part of this ease is due to the fact that these quotations come from catechetical materials, and that pastors and bishops are often forced to unite what theologians and ethicists are trained to separate. It would not be difficult to find comparable passages in Augustine’s City of God or Athanasius’ On the Incarnation that run roughshod over our customary disciplinary boundaries. Here again I think it is no accident that these two bishops/theologians from the past saw little to no difference between theology, biblical exegesis, and dealing with everyday pastoral matters.

There is, of course, no possibility of merely returning to the fourth or sixteenth century. One consolation of the Lord’s setting an angel with a flaming sword at the entrance of the Garden from which Adam and Eve had been evicted is that this same angel bars Christians from yearning for a past Golden Age to which we could hope to return. For Christianity, then, nostalgia for past times, with their alleged simplicity and purity, involves looking in the wrong direction. These are the times and habitations appointed to us and so these are the fields in which we must sow, toil, and reap. This still doesn’t mean, however, that Augustine, Athanasius, or Luther, in their very ignorance of our disciplinary divisions, can’t help illuminate the intellectual habits, fears, and prides of our own age.

Lamenting the present divisions of theology and ethics, Scripture and ethics, or theology and the political is a common enough gesture amongst contemporary theologians. While the typical response to these divisions is to offer a theory or method for relating disparate fields of inquiry, I take it that Brian’s response is actually to perform the overcoming of these disciplinary divides, and to do so in various ways. One of the ways is to look at past theologians and notice how they regularly transgress our divides between doxology, theology, ethics, and exegesis (as we have attempted above). Yet another potential way of circumventing these divides and creating new trajectories of inquiry is by reconfiguring our questions and presuppositions (as we will attempt below).

What happens in theology and ethics, for instance, when Scripture is understood not as a convenient catalogue of interesting facts about God, but as a disclosure of the very world around me and my place within this world? What if Scripture provides not a suspect and politicized historical record of the inner turmoil of an Ancient Near Eastern religion, but is the address and invitation of God? A common temptation when discussing Scripture is to assume that revelation is solely about God, all the while assuming that the world, those around me, and my very own self are simply self-evident. But what I understand Brian to be asking us to consider is that part and parcel of receiving Scripture as revelation is to become alert to how it opens up to us the world as creation and myself as one creature alongside and within this host of other creatures created and loved by God. Seen in this light, Scripture all of a sudden becomes an unruly mixtape of songs, poems, laments, and stories within the history between God and God’s creatures.

We might also see the church as the community for whom Scripture is such a disclosure of God, the world, and ourselves. It can be the revelation of God and creation inasmuch as the same God who wrestled with Jacob and Paul still wrestles with us today. Through its promises, commands, and histories Scripture is the address of God to his people and through its stories of praise, of grief, of losing and finding, it teaches us how to address God in return. Stated somewhat more abstractly, we might say that thinking about Scripture and the church, and their interrelationship, best takes place within a wider account of God’s dealings with his creatures. Such a lesson can be learned from Barth, or from Luther and his account of the church, the ecclesia, as one form of God’s care for his creatures.

Within these interviews Brian interacts some with one of the richer contemporary accounts of Scripture, exegesis, and the church offered by the so-called communitarians. The communitarians, to use the standard and yet clumsy label, names that group of thinkers who not only think that communities and churches are important (which they are), but who also insist upon a premier place for the church in Christian understandings of theology, exegesis, and ethics. In terms of method and procedure, we might say that communitarians are those who assume that ecclesiology or sociology must act as a kind of first philosophy, as an intellectual foundation upon which all else is built. Under this category we could include such strange bedfellows as Friedrich Schleiermacher, Stanley Hauerwas, and Leonardo Boff, all of whom are thinkers and people I deeply admire (and with Brian we might get two out of three). Yet one of the persistent tendencies of beginning with the church is that the church also ends up occupying the middle and the end. This is a polemical way of stating the matter, but I think it’s illuminating of a certain tendency as well. The response is not that the church is unimportant or unnecessary, but to emphasize how God uses Scripture precisely to bring the church out of itself and into the world, to instruct the church to look elsewhere than itself for its hopes, worries, and guidance. While this vision of Scripture and the church is offered as a kind of indirect criticism of the communitarians, it is not offered in the spirit of any deep antagonism, but as a kind of friendly pushing, like asking a running partner to do just one more lap.

We could also imagine what happens when discussions of providence do not directly fasten upon how we should relate different orders of causes or upon how one might respond to genuinely pastoral concerns about evil, suffering, and the efficacy of prayer. Theology and ethics will eventually have to address such concerns, but we could, for a moment, take a cue from Luther and envision God’s sustaining of creation within all the natural and cultural processes upon which we as individuals and as communities are dependent. So instead of speaking of primary and secondary causes or radical evil, we might try to speak of God’s providence within the contemporary world of monoculture, genetically modified food, and reproductive technology.

This trajectory and ease of movement between matters of Christian doctrine and matters of human interaction and technology hopefully seem less strange by now. For once we begin to name and praise the specifics of God’s care for his creatures—food, clothing, water, shelter—we are, just like Luther, led into the realm of material artifacts and thus of technology. It is no exaggeration to say that human life, ever since the first Oldowan stone tool kits, has always been intertwined with technology in the form of learned crafts, the manufacturing of tools and weapons, the organization of the natural world, and the utilization of nature’s recurring processes. Human existence and technology are in fact so deeply intertwined that when we ask what it is that preserves, sustains, and saves human life, it seems that technology is more than ready to fill that role. No less than the gospel, then, technology offers its own promises. While technology can certainly modify, recombine, and harness what it finds in ever more dizzying ways, it cannot create in any profound sense of the word.

These remarks are primarily intended to show the deep and natural affinity between doctrines of providence and discussions of technology, and are not meant as any type of blanket criticism of it. Many of us have loved ones whose very existence is predicated upon medical technology, and all of us depend upon technologies of agriculture and water purification. There are, then, no simple or obvious answers to the questions surrounding technology. But theology can offer the world insights into how technology views and forms us as creatures, and how quickly it can assume the mantle of creator and redeemer.

Just as God is present and at work in the mundane matters of providing food for his creatures and hope and consolation for his people, we might also wonder what happens when we view God as present and at work in the messy affairs of human interaction and life together. Jesus does not send his disciples out into a godforsaken wasteland, but out and into his own world, the world of his Father and Spirit. Just as we depend upon agriculture for our daily bread, on the church for learning how to sing praises to God, so too do we depend on a myriad of institutions, organizations, and structures for the goods of peace, safety, and sustenance. Here too, within the realm of life together, God is at work preserving and blessing his creatures, even the godless and the rogues.

These are hard words to speak and hear, for it is precisely the institutions that shape our life together that seem most corrupt, liable to abuse, and impervious to our hopes and pleas (and perhaps similar words about economics and the church are just as hard). Instead of siding with Luther and his account of politics, or politia, as yet another aspect of God’s care for his creatures, we might side with the Luther, or with the priest turned heretic in Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing, who says that the history of the world, with all its violent struggle, Realpolitik, and perpetual subjection of the weak by the powerful, is actually the visible manifestation of God’s wrath against sin. Perhaps, then, these are words that can be said and heard only in faith, and like Luther grab the bull by both horns. How, then, can Christians think of mission and political witness within a world that we know belongs to God and yet seems so controlled by the demonic?

Such a context makes all the more provocative Brian’s turn to the world of gardening to grasp this dynamic. Within this image the Great Commission sends disciples out into God’s garden, his vineyard. Within this garden we do not create the soil, the water, the sun, or the seeds. We till the soil, plant the seeds at the right time and depth, ensure that the level of sunlight and water is appropriate for the plants, and patiently wait on a myriad of forces beyond our control. This is a seductive vision of Christian witness in the world, but once again we might think that the world of politics hardly seems like a garden, and our politicians, interest groups, and violent neighbors hardly seem like roses, daffodils, and tulips. But they do depend on basic aspects of human communication, like trust, that cannot be made, and that can be courted and encouraged, but are rarely the focus of our discussions of politics and political ethics. The metaphor risks descending into ideology if it is mistaken for an alluring picture of what is a harsh and dark reality.

Despite such justified reservations, I still prefer this account of mission and politics to the other stock-in-trade images of culture-shapers, Christian leaders, or even Jesus radicals (all rosy-eyed and ideological in their own ways). The power of the metaphor is its ability to admit that God is always and already at work; to show how being receptive and patient isn’t the same as being passive and inert; and its sense that Christians should nurture life and growth wherever it is found. Christians can encourage these common and personal goods, and so attempt to be good and honest neighbors, by using their own questions, commitments, and practices. What I find refreshing about the discussion within these interviews is the thought that the goods to which Christians witness could potentially be perceived as beneficial and valuable to everyone, even on their own terms.

We have already invoked two of Brian’s theological influences, Luther and Augustine, but the reader should note that these are not your parents’ Luther and Augustine. Traditionally, many theologians and ethicists looked to Luther’s doctrine of the two kingdoms, the split between the spiritual and the secular realms, as the most promising of Luther’s potential contributions to contemporary thought. By contrast, what Brian finds helpful is Luther’s account of God and humanity in his late Genesis Lectures, as well as the fluidity and sweeping nature of his account of the three estates—economy, the church, and the political—as different forms of God’s care for his creatures. As for Augustine, Brian does not focus on the customary resource of Augustine’s gritty and rather weary realism regarding the ability to enact changes in the social realm, but instead turns to Augustine the exegete, and in particular the exegete of the Psalms. The two other main theological influences, Bonhoeffer and Barth, are once again somewhat different. Brian draws less on Bonhoeffer as a prophet of secularization, and more on Bonhoeffer as interpreter of the Psalms and